#443

Looking out of my window and listening to the grinding, slashing, peace-shattering noises of NUMB, TRUNDLING SHEEP BEINGS running their thrice-damned DEATH-DRINKING DEATH-EXHALING DEATH-DEALING MACHINES so they can DESTROY AND STERILIZE THEIR OWN HABITATS. 

It's fine. It just makes me feel like we all deserve to be immolated on the sharp edge of a nuclear blast wave. Fuck us. Honestly. What a bunch of shit-smeared stinking goddamn monkeys we turned out to be. Hard reset NOW!

*

No! No! Jesus, hold my hand.

We are luminous beings. These crude vestments are a deception and a false representation. 

We are doing the best we can. We are not the same. We are all one. My rage, born from my fear of death and failure, will not lead me towards hate. 

I will let it all pass through me, and over me, and when it is done, only I will remain. 

And I am a being of light and love, just like the people working on their lawns. They are my kin, and we are not different.

*

It is harmony that we must seek. If the world be ever more discordant, all the more beauty and richness must I add to my song.

Plus, there's a lot to be said for doom metal anthems and vicious punk refrains.

--JL

#442

Hey, have a post-1:00 a.m. post! That might have to happen consistently. It's a whole new life. We'll see, though. It is possible that I might reclaim part of the morning for writing. But then, it is morning.

*

Well, maybe I would have written a post, if the blind cat hadn't chosen one of her times to go absolutely electrically bugshit for pets and scratches. In this mood, she requires the most exhaustive and complete full-body workover that a cat can get, rubs and smushes and scritches everywhere but her forelimbs down and knees down. In this condition she also allows me to clear her eye sockets of dried gunk, which lowers the chance she'll get a deep itch and harm her eye area scratching away madly. 

Now she's licking her paws and forelimbs and the rest of her own business, completing her process thereby.

*

Hey, look at that, I have a cat. Cats sure are a thing.

*

Friends, I point towards the completely farcical, absolutely criminal stupidity on display with these AI suggestions on search queries, and I allow myself to quote Ian Malcolm: "Boy, do I hate being right all the time."

This exaggeratedly gross and unseemly preening is a fool's joke I'll allow myself as a seque into saying my actual point, which is that literally everything Michael Crichton and Philip K. Dick said was happening/would happen was and did and is right now, and far from giving a fuck, the web-fingered gnomes who get their money from greed-blind inhuman lunatics and their gasping, flopping acolytes work harder every day to do every single thing, to the letter, that these men strove to postulate would be absolutely disastrous, materially and spiritually, for our species and its societies. 

The improbably complete fuckups and pratfalls we are bearing witness to? The even crazier, more dangerous shit that I am reading that people are actually getting ready to try?

Literally Terminal Man out there. Literally Westworld. Literally A Scanner Darkly. Literally Jurassic Park. Literally The Minority Report. Or a fake/sanitized/extremely marketed version, which is equally scary because it culminates the same.

Fucks out here don't even have the excuse of not wanting to read a book, because they made good movies out of every single one of those and more besides.

Know motherfuckers watch movies. Sell them tickets these days! I can now attest, all kinds of people watch movies.

Anyway, hubris. The only cure is mortal agony. And too often in our benighted times, those whose hubris wracks our shared realities are never consequenced with so much as actual discomfort, let alone pain enough to humble or suffering enough to teach,

*

Well, that's my bad shit for the day. On a good note, people still go out and pay money to see Star Wars movies in a movie theater, even though they're fifty years old in some cases, and even though assholes say the ones that aren't are bad. It doesn't seem to stop people who love Star Wars, and I say that this is a good and a noble thing, a cause for hope; one small thing to celebrate.

Take your pick of them. They matter just as much as all the sad infiuriating bullshit that gets rammed down our throats.

Bears repeating, and I'm always pleased to type a little more: whatever gleam of light you can see in the great and indomitable darkness of this universe is real, and not just real. Those small joys, those everyday comforts, are worth everything. The reason we hope. The reason we pray. The reason we want to be okay and the way we get there. 

Hold the things that make you happy to your lips like a glowing coal. They are worth hoping for, worth protecting, and when you speak through them, you speak in the voice of love, the voice of God.

--JL

#441

The past week has only seen me grow more untethered from reality. As I make the clock real again in order to pin myself to its hands and thus ride its motions to and from a physical place, it loses what lax grip it had on those hours not devoted to that process. Losing myself more completely in what I'm doing and thinking and the fundamental neglect of the realities that involve paperwork and phone calls and emails and telling agencies that your income has changed--all that is as vapor which dispels as soon as I realize it is there, unnoticed till it vanishes again at my mind's accidental touch.

Been spending hours just standing in the sun, thinking. Looking at the plants in my backyard day by day. 

*

Also doing a bunch of shit. Painting and mowing and hauling and digging and chopping and planting and pulling and vacuuming and salvaging and breaking down and  planning, planning, planning, my mind a frothing ferment of ideas and timelines and stratagems and concepualizations of every description I can generate. 

Awash in tides of flotsam. A floating life in an infinite void informed by infinite debris, infinite illuminations.

Reading books and playing games more than before, seeing friends more than before, talking with Ezra more (we always talk a lot, but sometimes there are phases where we can't seem to fit in every idea and story and problem-solving and whatever other thing that we need to even though we never shut up--exhausting, but exhilirating), getting to know coworkers and the new job. Time seems to have dilated and set to a sprint; even as the days pass more hurriedly they giving the impression of having slowed overall--feels like two months since last I pounded words into this blank, yet the actual seven or eight days have perhaps carried enough in them to justify these contrasting impressions. 

And yet it does also seem that I come to myself after an unspecified span of sitting on the couch, staring into the middle distance, having thought myself into a perfect silence. Days where the depression is bad. Days where I don't even know what the fuck is going on and I barely drink a glass of water. All I can do is follow my own private thread, the double yellow line deep inside my brain the only guide, no compass, no altimeter, no clock, no stars.

*

Change. Hm. 

What is this life? All its seasons and transformations, its dragonfire and its long and lightless nights?

*

Hm.

--JL

#440

If I had not written what I had yesterday, and not thought about the people I was thinking about, would I have still been pierced later that same day by the sight of my ex-fiancee, more beautiful than ever, literally reading a book at a table by herself in the middle of the street, long dress flowing in the breeze? Would I have had to hang my head low as I did not break pace? Watch my spirit crash into the windows and walls like a bird caught in a burning room?

Fuck man what the hell. What do you even do with this.

*

Just.

Endure.

That.

Is.

All.

The.

Universe.

Can. 

Ask. 

For a little while.

--JL

#439

Seeing an old classmate by chance and having a little chat gets increasingly surreal as time flows. Some of my cohort, myself included, turn thirty-five this year. Bob and I had known each other since middle school and seen each on and off for a few years after high school as our separate workplaces shared back lot and a dumpster. But once that played out after about three years we'd not seen each other maybe ten years, and my old workplace plus the back lot and dumpster are literally gone, replaced by a high rise, and Bob's old work is a different storefront now, facing a wholly transformed street, as is the way of urban life. Our small and silly city.

Not being on any form of social media, I have no idea what has become of almost anyone I've ever met. Even people I have cohabited with, even people I loved and made love to for years.

That's just how it be.

--JL

#438

Today's post might have been one of those posts that begin like "Here I am again, about to yell about how crap the news is at doing its job. God damn what the fuck kind of analysis and priorities etc etc etc" but then it struck that it's a shitty part of the hobby. Kind of like if I wrote occasional but fairly evenly distributed posts about how assholes fucked with me while I was driving.

In the time that I've been writing this blog, let alone beforehand, people have been unbelievable pricks to me thousands of times using the way they drive their cars, and thousands more than that have risked my life or fucked with my temper simply by being idiotic or fallible. A few have come close to killing me. But even though this is direct and real, reportable and an actual set of memories involving actual unique circumstances, I never bitch about it on factually pointless. I bitch about liars lying and occluding using tools designed to help them lie and misdirect on a grand scale, as though they would do anything else. It's their jobs. There's a whole infrastructure around bullshit production. Who am I to tell anyone to shut up?

I never bitch about that other stuff because who cares, right? I've forgotten about it by the time I'm stepping out of the car, though the event gets filed away with he rest for recall purposes, presumably. And who cares also in the sense that it happens to every single one of us. It's how impersonal contact with physical bodies is. By extension, getting fucked with by the powers that be and suffering disaster and upheavals is merely the human condition. Everybody knows this flavor. So the running commentary of a bunch of chittering mynocks only sours the experience, frankly, and running a commentary on that commentary may be asinine. Knowing what politicians are up to has never helped me personally or helped me help anyone else. Maybe I should concentrate on my own monkeysphere and quit thinking about geopolitics.

Think about it. Is it more useful to spend time getting to know people in my neighborhood and striving to contribute to my city and community, or learning the timeline and general sense of the diplomatic interrelations of the Eurasian theater? I mean if knowing about stuff like that isn't your job, you probably might not care to put a lot of effort into the latter. You would probably naturally gravitate towards the former, and you'd be right. That perverse imp astride my shoulders has kept my nose too much in the book. Knowing things feels good, but is perhaps less than utile if not consistently put into some form of praxis beyond doing the least harm and surviving on my own terms.

The cultivation of a perspective that I can respect myself for has come at something of a cost.

Whatever. Perhaps the answer is to double down on my policy of trying my best to only read real websites. Stop with the mass media too. Soon I will have to quit streaming, when it's literally just tv again. A return to a more intentional curation of a more limited and difficult-to-obtain culture, both to experience and to possess. Should quit the news entirely, make use of the Fire Index, and figure out what is happening from context and casual commentary. Who cares if it's accurate or real? It's perceptions and lies and impressions all swirling around and what it will come down to in life is just the choices you made while everything was happening, which are valid no matter what you know or don't know because how could you possibly know enough ever to make a properly informed decision?

No one can. One of the reasons we are all guilty before one another, and can therefore let go.

*

One of the points in this book I'm reading now is that for behavior to change, structures need to change. It is the single greatest point of contention I have found within the text: I could not disagree more. It is precisely in the change of our behaviors based on a revaluation of our values that our lives beyond and around those structures exist. It is in the discipline and will to behave as we please, and not as we are incentivized, that our future lies.

--JL

#437

Liking the movie theater work. Perhaps I was born to be culture's most open and servile gatekeeper. 

Actually it barely seems real. Too wild not having the superhuman demanded of you. Normal, human expectations around normal, human work?

I keep expecting someone to tell me they need to pull two gruelingly physical doubles in a row or I'm fired. And instead it's like, "are you okay with sweeping up these ten popcorn kernels? I can get someone else if you're not feeling it right now, though. It's enough that you're standing there. I appreciate you."

Could I have been working here this whole time? Is this even real, here, now? What other shoe will drop, possibly from airplane height to kill me on the spot?

*

Some kid asked me if I knew how to fill a 3-compartment sink when I said I was down to wash the ten whole objects that need washing at the end of the night.

Perhaps too well, I had to tell him, suppressing real belly laughter. Never in my life have I even conceived of such an easy time at the triple sink. Astonishing. Can't believe people live like this.

*

I am grateful, awed even. But I have a lot of other feelings, too. Like, what? What?

*

Everyone is really, really nice and fun to talk with, also. WHAT? 

*

Mustn't let my guard down. Everything has its cutting edges and tragedy isn't something that only happens to strangers elsewhere. 

S'nice, though.

--JL